Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday November 30, 2009 @06:56PM
from the bayes-essay-on-chance-ftw dept.

krou writes "To celebrate its 350th anniversary, the Royal Society has released a number of historic science papers and made them available online via its Trailblazing website. Among the papers are Benjamin Franklin's notes on his kite-flying experiment, a paper on black holes co-written by Professor Stephen Hawking, manuscripts from Sir Isaac Newton showing 'that white light is a mixture of other colours,' and a few other interesting details such as 'a gruesome account of a 17th century blood transfusion.'"

Yeah, this is fascinating stuff, especially as I'm reading Quicksilver [wikipedia.org] right now, in which are depicted "plausible recreations" of some early Society experiments in optics, chemistry, physics, and physiology, including a rather gruesome account of the live dissection of a dog.

Stephenson also breathes some life and character into historical figures associated with the Royal Society, not the least of whom are Newton and Leibniz. Worth a read if you have any interest in the history of science.

(The words you give aren't exactly incorrect, they're just a weird choice of forms)

For the benefit of those of us who haven't studied latin but are interested in languages, what are the forms you've given? What are the forms OP has given? If those answers don't make it readily apparent, why are OP's choices weird?

Latin adjectives are given in the nominative singular case with the endings for masculine and nonmasculine forms, unless such forms are the same, in which case genitive singular case is used.
Vivus -a -um is a 1st/2nd declension (not sure, they're the same) adjective. Thus ksemlerK's use would be either dative or ablative. (giving life, having life or from life, roughly)
Verbs have their present active infinitive (or passive, for deponent verbs) and any other endings needed to insure correct spelling indica

Seconded.
Whenever I don't have any new books to read, I re-read bits of the Baroque Cycle - I'm reading The Confusion for something like the 5th time at the moment, and still loving every moment of it.

Pfft Newton: A 15th century theologian who claimed that Jesus was sent to Earth to "operate the levers of gravity", stuck pins in his eyes to figure out the "nature of light", wrote close to million words on the numerology of 666, and snorted mercury fumes on the weekends.

Pfft Newton: A 15th century theologian who claimed that Jesus was sent to Earth to "operate the levers of gravity", stuck pins in his eyes to figure out the "nature of light", wrote close to million words on the numerology of 666, and snorted mercury fumes on the weekends.

Of course, it appears that the articles were already on the web, and the trailblazer website is just a very, very cool index of existing information. But, I think it's required that every slashdot summary contain at least one easily verified and incorrect fact, so that readers will be more engaged with the website and read more advertising.

That's an early form of the letter "s", the "long S" from Carolingian Minuscule. You'll notice it has no crossbar, as does the letter "f". The "s" we know was often used at the end of words as a bit of shorthand, similar to the cursive un-crossed T.

The quote should read "Make a small cross, of two light strips of cedar".

This is really cool stuff, and I find it very interesting to scroll the timeline on Trailblazing to get an idea of the historical context of these papers. I just wish there were more than 60 of them and covering more fields. Still, I'm looking forward to reading Watson and Crick's paper, Gould and Lewontin's paper, and perhaps even Maxwell's paper if I can handle it.

I'm a really big fan of the Royal Society. They have so much high quality research available under Open Access, including any papers in Philosophical Transactions B (which I tend to get stuff from the most as my interests are more related to Biology) that are more than a year old. I'm looking forward to their 350th Anniversary Issue [royalsocie...ishing.org] which comes out in 2 weeks under Open Access. It's looking to have some interesting articles. In fact, all of the things they are doing for their 350th anniversary are really cool. Check them out: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/authors/2010.xhtml [royalsocie...ishing.org]

Yea great guys. Too bad they have made aggressive legal threats of copyright enforcement against anyone else who distributes other similarly old papers. There are about 40,000 papers in the Philosophical transactions which are old enough to be unconditionally public domain— yet you can't obtain them, at least not without paying a couple bucks a pop to the royal society.

Why the hell weren't these publicly available to begin with?
I see the article says "put online"; what does that mean? Were they available, just limited to microfilm or something like that? I hope they were freely available before.

The Royal Society really does typify the content led questioning society that the world used to be. By establishing a body (The Royal Society) with the express intention of enabling that form of dicussion it represented very much a broad view that facts were what moved society forward rather than opinions.

How far we have fallen from 200 years ago into a world where opinion matters more than facts and where its routine for big companies in particular to hide data that doesn't match the outcome that they want.

The current pieces around Climate Change are a great example as to how far we have fallen, people with zero background, training or experience in a field are claiming that their opinions are just as valid as someone who are studied a field for 20 years.

We have people questioning doctors and demanding antibioticsWe have people believing rubbish like homeopathy because their "opinion" is it worksWe have presidents believing that FAITH in something (WMDs) is more important that actual factsWe have people questioning evolution because their FAITH says it isn't so

Hopefully in 100 years our great-grand-children will look back on this as the biggest era of deliberate human stupidy. Its not often the past is actually better but the basis of the Royal Society and indeed the society which it represented 200 years ago is a much more rational and measured one than the FoxNews driven debates of today.

I often think that Fox News would be firmly on the "gravity denier" side if it had been around at the time of Newton.

The placebo effect is a real thing, and it works better if the placebo is expensive.

It is indeed real but that doesn't make homeopathy real. I have no problems with the placebo effect or even people who deliberately sell a placebo wrapped in mumbo jumbo what I have is a problem with people selling a placebo who don't have the intellectual honesty to admit its just a placebo.

The placebo effect is a real thing, and it works better if the placebo is expensive.

It is indeed real but that doesn't make homeopathy real. I have no problems with the placebo effect or even people who deliberately sell a placebo wrapped in mumbo jumbo what I have is a problem with people selling a placebo who don't have the intellectual honesty to admit its just a placebo.

The placebo works, homeopathy doesn't.

But the placebo only works if you believe it's a real cure. If you say "this is a placebo", then it won't.

I understand why you're pissed at them for conning the gullible, but I'm just saying, you have to understand that the clients who are convinced that it works are actually feeling better by taking the placebo, so don't be mad at them for feeling better and saying so.

...you have to understand that the clients who are convinced that it works are actually feeling better by taking the placebo...

But was it worth it?

They got the benefit of pain releif but only at the cost of being a potential intelectual burden on society. If people like that mind their own business they can believe what they want but if they start using their uninformed opinions to make the world worse for the rest of us then I say it's better to educate rather than let them just believe.

I'm not sure this is true. In the early Victorian period in particular the drive for rationalism and empirical information was everywhere. The heros of the age were scientists, explorers and engineers.

In Newton's time there was more mumbo jumbo but do remember that they changed the laws of the country to allow him to take up his chair at Cambridge, this led (in part) to the explosion of non-comformist religions in the UK.

Benjamin Franklin was a hero in the US in the early victorian era (IIRTTC) and is a g

It was not uncommon in earlier days for "scientists" to publish the results that their political rulers wanted to hear. The only difference is that today the political rulers have billions of taxpayer dollars to hand out to "scientists" who can produce studies supporting the political correct party line.

I'm surprised that more slash/dotters are not more skeptical of the politically popular line.

In the early Victorian period in particular the drive for rationalism and empirical information was everywhere. The heros of the age were scientists, explorers and engineers.

Don't be so sure of this. Your view of those times is based on the writings of the intelligentsia, who may have held the scientists as heroes. The unwashed masses were just as ignorant and superstitious as before (and now).

...how far we have fallen, people with zero background, training or experience in a field are claiming that their opinions are just as valid as someone who are studied a field for 20 years.

Um... questioning authority is kinda the hallmark of science. I understand what you're saying - science is underappreciated - but empowering people to seek the truth for themselves is what science is!

The 16th century's Glorious Revolution was society saying "How come we have to believe Galen? I'm [wikipedia.org] gonna dissect some humans myself and see what's inside." We didn't need authority to be our conduit to truth: we could seek truth directly. (At the same time, people were rebelling against needing the Pope as a conduit to God, and voila, Protestantism.)

What I think the GP was getting and (and I agree with this) is that it is not uncommon for people to assert that their baseless opinion or feeling on is just as valid as a professional's fact- and reason- based conclusions.

No one would suggest that people should be stopped from questioning authority or science, but they should question it based on reason and fact, not opinion and feeling. More generally, it seems like the right to hold one's own opinion has mutated into the right to have other people respec

Well, challenging authority with evidence is the hallmark of science. In the past, the authority (i.e. power) was typically part of a religious institution. These days (this is how I interpret your parent post) people use opinion to challenge the authority of the scientific process (as distinct from the authority of individual scientists).

I've looked over this archive (before Slashdot posted it), and I found several articles which were very interesting to me.

Leeuwenhoek's description [doi.org] of the "little animals" he saw with his early microscope (1677) -- this one is quite long and many entries are repetitive, but it is a detailed account of Leeuwenhoek's regular experiments and observations with microscopic life forms.

Surviving in a room heated to 260 degrees Fahrenheit [doi.org] (1775) -- this paper strikes me as absolutely incredulous in its claims; I did not know that people could survive such heat (I have not yet found any modern information supporting or disproving this claim, so information about this from a modern science perspective would be nice!).

I have a large backlog of papers which I would like to read, but which I cannot right now due to time constraints. I certainly would like to read more of these if I had the time to do so.

Bravo to the Royal Society for making these publicly accessible and easily explored. I now have an urge to read some of the early Philosophical Transaction papers not highlighted in Trailblazing.

The notes on blood transfusion (year 1666) are basically a set of "tryals proposed", questions about whether traits will be inherited when transfusing blood between dogs of different temper, size and colour.

As such they do make a very interesting and non-gruesome read. We have come a long way.

I also found
the article itself [royalsocie...ishing.org]
to be remarkably readable in every aspect (language, spelling and fonts). I did not expect that at all, but then again I am not in the habit of reading 17th century English.

Its really just amazing how quickly we've come in those 350 Years, when the
Royal Society was founded we had no theory of gravity, electricity, heat, air
magnetism or engines. The most complex machines, we're clocks and windmills.
It make you think how far and how quickly man kind has come.